Teaching through urban sensorium: urban spatiality as a smart learning environment

This paper qualitatively analyses the implication of urban sensorium as a pedagogic mode in the teaching of Urban Studies. Underpinned by the frames of smart learning environments, the paper reiterates experiencing urban ontologies as spatial learning environments. By drawing from a range of transdisciplinary and experiential modes of learning, this paper maps how an undergraduate course on Bangalore city in India served learners to critically engage with and experience spatial urban ontologies both digitally, and in real-world experiences of learning, furthering learner autonomy and reflection. The methodological prisms of this paper are autoethnography and critical reflection. It is organised around enabling learners recognize the experiential, embodied urban spaces through the urban sensorium via real-life engagements with urban spaces, and creation of digital portfolios that map this learning. Findings from the learners’ knowledge of sensory learning, the city’s intersectional aspects, and the student’s embodied and emplaced self in built environments and digital spaces are analysed via cognitive and affective-reflection levels; the course instructor's reflection is analysed via a process-reflection level. These reflections hold implications for the pedagogy of urban studies in undergraduate classrooms by foregrounding spatiality and urban sensorium as significant critical and affective pedagogic tools. The paper has also accommodated critical engagement with an external faculty member as a co-author, in order to manage any bias or researcher subjectivity in the design.

Evaluating the legibility of urban parks based on neuroscience and the FVFL model

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to quantitatively evaluate the role of landscape values and factors in urban parks experimentally based on neuroscience.Design/methodology/approachIn the first step, ten major parks were selected out of 59 regional and trans-regional parks in Tehran for field study analysis. Next, considering the diversity and abundance of landscape elements in the selected parks, Mellat Park was chosen for the case study.FindingsThe fixation duration of the factors has an average correlation coefficient of 0.5865, −0.5035 and −0.5125 for the overall sketch map, quality and accuracy, respectively. The results indicated that the “quality of people's cognitive maps” has a direct relation to fixation duration on “human-made factors” and an inverse relation to fixation duration on “natural factors” and “human activities and behavioral factors” in the park.Practical implicationsThe results can pave the way for further research in the interdisciplinary fields of landscape architecture and neuroscience.Originality/valueLegibility is a superior quality of urban spaces that profoundly affect how people perceive and behave.

Change by Activism: Insurgency, Autonomy, and Political Activism in Potosí-Jerusalén, Bogotá, Colombia

Cities today face a context in which traditional politics and policies struggle to cope with increasing urbanisation rates and growing inequalities. Meanwhile, social movements and political activists are rising up and inhabiting urban spaces as sites of contestation. However, through their practices, urban activists do more than just occupy spaces; they are fundamental drivers of urban transformation as they constantly face—and contest—spatial manifestations of power. This article aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on the role of activism in the field of urban design, by engaging with two concepts coming from the Global South: <em>insurgency</em> and <em>autonomy</em>. Through a historical account of the building of the Potosí-Jerusalén neighbourhood in Bogotá in the 1980s, it illustrates how both concepts can provide new insight into urban change by activism. On the one hand, the concept of insurgency helps unpack a mode of bottom-up action that inaugurates political spaces of contestation with the state; autonomy, on the other hand, helps reveal the complex nature of political action and the visions of urban transformation it entails. Although they were developed at the margins of conventional design theory and practice, both concepts are instrumental in advancing our understanding of how cities are shaped by activist practices. Thus, this article is part of a broader effort to (re)locate political activism in discussions about urban transformation, and rethink activism as a form of urban design practice.

Urban scale digital twins in data-driven society: Challenging digital universalism in urban planning decision-making

The article examines the impact of the virtual public sphere on how urban spaces are experienced and conceived in our data-driven society. It places particular emphasis on urban scale digital twins, which are virtual replicas of cities that are used to simulate environments and develop scenarios in response to policy problems. The article also investigates the shift from the technical to the socio-technical perspective within the field of smart cities. Despite the aspirations of urban scale digital twins to enhance the participation of citizens in the decision-making processes relayed to urban planning strategies, the fact that they are based on a limited set of variables and processes makes them problematic. The article aims to shed light on the tension between the real and the ideal at stake during this process of abstracting sets of variables and processes in the case of urban scale digital twins.

The impact of COVID-19 on hunters in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos: a qualitative analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated efforts to engage critically with forest-adjacent, rural, communities who rely on wildlife. In this study, we interviewed 109 hunters of wildlife across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos regarding the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on them individually, as well as more generally within their communities. We found that negative economic impacts such as loss of employment and constrained finances due to rising prices was an especially prevalent theme due to city-wide lockdowns, factory closures, and border closures. In Vietnam, hunting was stated to have increased as young men were forced to return to their villages to work; however, trade in wildlife was believed to have decreased due to the inability of middlemen traders to easily leave urban spaces or cross-country lines. This theme of barriers to trade was found in Cambodia and Laos as well. Our results show the importance of establishing sustainable, non-wildlife-dependent livelihoods within rural communities, to mitigate hunting and mitigate the potential for emerging infectious disease transmission. Overall, our results show the value in engaging with hunters to understand locally and spatially-specific trends, and provide direction for future avenues of research.

Evaluation of the Visually Impaired Experience of the Sound Environment in Urban Spaces

Visually impaired people have unique perceptions of and usage requirements for various urban spaces. Therefore, understanding these perceptions can help create reasonable layouts and construct urban infrastructure. This study recruited 26 visually impaired volunteers to evaluate 24 sound environments regarding clarity, comfort, safety, vitality, and depression. This data was collected in seven different types of urban spaces. An independent sample non-parametric test was used to determine the significance of the differences between environmental evaluation results for each evaluation dimension and to summarize the compositions of sound and space elements in the positive and negative influence spaces. The results suggested that visually impaired people (1) feel comfort, safety, and clarity in parks, residential communities, and shopping streets; (2) have negative perceptions of vegetable markets, bus stops, hospitals, and urban departments; (3) feel anxious when traffic sounds, horn sounds, manhole cover sounds, and construction sounds occur; and (4) prefer spaces away from traffic, with fewer and slower vehicles, with a suitable space scale, and moderate crowd density. These results provide a reference for the future design of activity venues (i.e., residential communities, vegetable markets, bus stops, parks, shopping streets, hospitals, and urban functional departments) and the planning of accessibility systems for visually impaired urban residents.

“It’s Your Breath in Our Lungs”: Sean Feucht’s Praise and Worship Music Protests and the Theological Problem of Pandemic Response in the U.S.

In response to U.S. government restrictions imposed as part of a nationwide response to the COVID-19 pandemic, charismatic worship leader Sean Feucht began a series of worship concerts. Feucht positioned these protests as expressions of Christian religious freedom in opposition to mandated church closings and a perceived double-standard regarding the large gatherings of protesters over police violence against Black and Brown persons. Government restrictions challenged the sine qua non liturgical act of encounter with God for evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Charismatics: congregational singing in Praise and Worship. However, as Feucht’s itinerant worship concerts traversed urban spaces across the U.S. to protest these restrictions, the events gained a double valence. Feucht and event attendees sought to channel God’s power through musical worship to overturn government mandates and, along the way, they invoked longstanding social and racial prejudices toward urban spaces. In this essay, I argue that Feucht’s events reveal complex theological motivations that weave together liturgical-theological, social, and political concerns. Deciphering this complex tapestry requires a review of both the history of evangelical engagement with urban spaces and the theological history of Praise and Worship. Together, these two sets of historical resources generate a useful frame for considering how Feucht, as a charismatic musical worship leader, attempts to wield spiritual power through musical praise to change political situations and the social conditions.